Janet Daley was born in America where she began her political life on the Left as an undergraduate at Berkeley. She moved to Britain (and to the Right) in 1965 where she spent nearly twenty years in academic life before becoming a political commentator: all factors that inform her writing on British and American policy and politicians.

The Lindsey strikers go back to work: but were they traduced?

So the wildcat strike is over at Lindsey oil refinery - and presumably so is the rash of similar actions in the rest of the country. Is that it? End of impasse: no more embarassment for the Government, no more awkward questions about the ramifications of our EU arrangements for the "free" movement of Labour which seemed to amount to little more than the freedom of a company to import workers from wherever suited its immediate convenience. I wonder if those local people in Lincolnshire will be willing to forget how the political leaders of their country traduced them when all that they were demanding was a fair opportunity to earn a living? For that egregious sin, they were smeared with the charge of "xenophobia", accused of being benighted bigots who failed to welcome foreigners into their midst, and generally pilloried as the reactionary scum of the globalised earth. Any politician (or media commentator) who dared to express sympathy for them was attacked as "populist", "opportunist" or worse. And most of this abuse was being hurled by people on the Left. (The Conservatives joined in the chorus for good measure, presumably to prove that they weren't "Rightwing".)

Well I used to be on the Left, and I seem to recall that back then we regarded our mission as supporting the needs and concerns of ordinary working people who wanted an honest job. To see Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson leading a chorus of abuse against men who had been put out of work in Lindsay was truly shocking. To borrow the cadences of Neil Kinnock: to see a Labour government – a Labour government - abandoning British working people in this way was an indication of how corrupted our political leaders have become by the European power block. Presumably New Labour (and its New Conservative counterparts) can now only be sympathetic to working class people when they are basket cases: unemployed, "deprived" and passive. In the true spirit of European paternalism, you are only entitled to help when you are unable or unwilling to help yourself.